U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [157]
b'fo' day and goes out to haul foa hawgsheads a tobacca an de goddam nigger done lost de warehouse key. Ah
swear if Ah'd had a gun Ah'd shot de son of a bitch dead." At the end of the bridge he stopped and Charley helped him change the tire. "Where you from, boy?" he said as he straightened up and brushed the dust off his pants.
"I'm from up in the Northwest,"said Charley. "Ah reckon you're a Swede, ain't yez?" Charley laughed. "No; I'm a garage mechanic and lookin' for a job." "Pahl in, boy;
-395-we'l go an' see ole man Wiggins --he's ma boss --an' see what we can do." Charley stayed al summer in Louisvil e working at the Wiggins Repair Shops. He roomed with an Italian named Grassi who'd come over to escape military service. Grassi read the papers every day and was very much afraid the U. S. would go into the war. Then he said he'd have to hop across the border to Mexico. He was an anarchist and a quiet sort of guy who spent the evenings singing low to himself and playing the accordion on the lodginghouse steps. He told Charley about the big Fiat factories at Torino where he'd worked, and taught him to eat
spaghetti and drink red wine and to play Funiculi funicula on the accordion. His big ambition was to be an airplane pilot. Charley picked up with a Jewish girl who worked as sorter in a tobacco warehouse. Her name was Sarah Cohen but she made him cal her Bel e. He liked her wel enough but he was careful to make her understand that he wasn't the marrying kind. She said she was a radical and believed in free love, but that didn't suit him much either. He took her to shows and took her out walking in Cherokee Park and bought her an amethyst brooch
when she said amethyst was her birthstone.
When he thought about himself he felt pretty worried. Here he was doing the same work day after day, with no chance of making better money or getting any school-ing or seeing the country. When winter came on he got restless. He'd rescued an old Ford roadster that they were going to tow out to the junkheap and had patched it up with discarded spare parts.
He talked Grassi into going down to New Orleans
with him. They had a little money saved up and they'd run down there and get a job and be there for the Mardi Gras. The first day that he'd felt very good since he left St. Paul was the sleety January day they pul ed out of Louisvil e with the engine hitting on al four cylinders
-396-and a pile of thirdhand spare tires in the back, headed south.
They got down through Nashvil e and Birmingham
and Mobile, but the roads were terrible and they had to remake the car as they went along and they almost froze to death in a blizzard near Guntersvil e and had to lay over for a couple of days, so that by the time they'd gotten down to Bay St. Louis and were bowling along the shore road under a blue sky and feeling the warm sun and seeing palms and bananatrees and Grassi was tel ing about Vesuvio and Bel a Napoli and his girl in Torino that he'd never see again on account of the bastardly capitalista war, their money had run out. They got into New
Orleans with a dol ar five between them and not more than a teacupful of gasoline in the tank, but by a lucky break Charley managed to sel the car as it stood for twentyfive dol ars to a colored undertaker.
They got a room in a house near the levee for three dol ars a week. The landlady was a yel owfaced woman from Panama and there was a parrot on the balcony out-side their room and the sun was warm on their shoulders walking along the street. Grassi was very happy. "This is lika the Italia," he kept saying. They walked around and tried to find out about jobs but they couldn't seem to find out about anything except that Mardi Gras was next week. They walked along Canal Street that was
crowded with colored people, Chinamen, pretty girls in brightcolored dresses, racetrack hangerson, tal elderly men in palmbeach suits. They stopped to have a beer in a bar open to the street with tables along the outside where al kinds of men sat smoking cigars and drinking. When they came out Grassi bought an afternoon paper. He turned pale and showed the headline, WAR WITH